Please note that the chapter below is an early draft. Names and world-building details subject to change.

Isa tried to rise and face the three Krellishmen but the moment he sat up, pain rocked him like a cannonball to the side of a ship, turning his stomach and sending horrible light splinters across his vision. Separating from the memory of Taniri had been agony, but this was a blunter sort of pain. Less poetic. A hangover.

“Osu…” Isa’s head hadn’t done this to him in years. “Why…?” The jug hadn’t been that big, had it?

“I just told you why,” one of Telasus’ men snapped. “I thought pythons were blind, not deaf.”

“Neither,” Isa grunted, “but… if you could just—” He put a hand to the side of his head—“talk a little quieter… What were you saying about Telasus?”

“He requests an audience with you.”

“Requests, huh?” Isa’s free hand automatically went to the sheets beside him, where he would have placed his sabers under normal circumstances.

“Looking for these?” the man patted the Azenkari sabers strapped to his hip.

“I was,” Isa admitted, unable to think of lies over the pounding pain between his ears.

“You can have them back, if you do the smart thing and come back with us to the Church of Infinite Prosperity.”

“And if I’m not that smart?”

“I think you know.”

“Yeah,” Isa sighed. “You’ll execute me here instead of out back?”

There was no other reason for Telasus to send a swordsman and two gunmen to “request an audience.” Osu knew he had servants for that.

“No one said anything about an execution,” the older of the gunmen said in a gentle, measured voice Isa might have trusted from someone not wearing a tradelord’s uniform.

Isa recognized the two gunmen as the guards who worked the night shift at the front doors of Telasus’ church—the older looking like he’d be sorry to put a bullet between Isa’s eyes, the younger looking like he couldn’t wait. Isa had never bothered to learn their names, so he addressed the thieving swordsman instead.

“Look… It’s Bensidar, right?”

“Yes.”

“Look, Bensidar, I didn’t touch any of Telasus’ cargo and I’m about to leave Krell anyway. Can’t we just leave it at that and pretend I never existed?”

“You know better than anyone that’s not how this works, Inkarnam. Tradelord Telasus took you into the back.” Bensidar’s voice had dropped in weird, nervous reverence, as though they were discussing the boss’ nethers and not his merchandise. “You saw the inside of his warehouse.”

Isa uttered—in retrospect, a rather juvenile—snort of laughter. “What does he think I’m going to do? Run and tell his competitors how many crates of carpets he’s stocked in Belzadoni cerulean?”

The three painfully bright faces before him remained deathly serious and Isa remembered that they were in Krell. That was exactly the kind of camel shit Telasus was worried about.

“Can never be too careful,” Bensidar echoed his boss, not really pulling off the gravity.

The younger gunman already had his pistol fully cocked.

“Well, the High Inkarnai told me not to go anywhere with strange men,” Isa said, hoping that if he just bought time for his eyes to adjust, the light cutting into the room from between the rickety shutters would stop hurting so much. “And you know that if you kill me here, Telasus is gonna take any damages to the inn out of your pay.”

“How do you know you won’t be recouping the cost for him?” the younger gunman sneered, his muzzleloader already half-raised.

“Because I’m sure as shade not going with you willingly and I’m too dangerous to keep as a slave.”

“You flatter yourself, Inkarnam.”

“Do I?”

The strongest human didn’t have half the muscles a python did. But Isa’s years in the python’s body had taught him how to create explosive movement from total stillness—even in human form. He threw himself over the far side of the bed before the gunman squeezed the trigger. A deafening bang sent straw and feathers flying as Isa dropped into the gap between the bed and the wall. The space was too small for a grown man, but just right for a grown python.

In the storm of goose plumage, Isa transformed.

Inkarnai spells were tight and efficient, like the machinery of a gun. The moment Isa gave the command, the machine moved, one mechanism triggering another. Like the hammer dropping displaced the frizzen, Isa’s human body displaced the python, forcing it from pocket space into the physical world. As the spark of flint on frizzen jumped to the primer charge, Isa’s consciousness sprang from Osu’s domain into Aer’s, from the physical world to the Gray. The snake’s nervous system and the disembodied electricity of Isa’s synapses were mapped onto each other like fitted gears. From the Gray, his mental connection to the python snapped into place, completing the spell.

There was a moment of blessed relief as the ringing in Isa’s ears, the headache, and the nausea vanished. His snake form, after all, had drunk no wine and heard no gunshot. By the time the young gunman had scrambled around to line up a new shot, Isa had already slithered beneath the bed.

“He’s transformed!” the guard exclaimed as Isa pulled the last of his coils into the dark and fixed his attention on the two warm pairs of ankles on the other side of the bed. “Caref—”

That was as far as he got before Isa exploded again, this time with the ten thousand muscles of the python. Boots were ample protection against most snakes, but not a full-grown reticulated python. Isa’s teeth went through the leather, through skin and tendon, and hit bone. Before the older gunman could scream, Isa contracted, yanking his head back under the bed and bringing the man’s ankle with it. Had this been a one-on-one fight, Isa would have dragged his victim straight into a lethal reptilian embrace beneath the bed. Fighting multiple opponents required more strategy. As the gunman crashed to the floor, Isa released his ankle in a warm spray of blood, and lunged from beneath the bed, transforming as he went.

Isa’s human body wasn’t the only physical item written into the spell. His clothes, belt, and sabers were all tagged as part of the transformation. When his human body dropped into pocket space, so did they. And when it returned to Osu’s domain, they came with it, falling into their assigned places relative to his body—boots on his feet, cassock buttoned, belt buckled around him, sabers in their scabbards at each hip. It was a nuance of the spell that the non-magic rarely questioned. It never seemed to strike them as odd that he transformed fully clothed, nor occur to them that he might use the same magic to restore his weapons to him when they were lost or stolen.

Of course, the headache also returned with his human form, lancing back into him like a pair of bayonet blades to the temples. Isa pushed through it and plunged a saber into his fallen victim. At his heels, a second gunshot decimated what remained of the mattress, feeling to Isa like that pair of bayonets had just fired into his speared brain.

In the fresh cloud of feathers, the old gunman choked on his own blood, Isa’s saber driven far into his solar plexus, curving into the vital organs beneath his ribs. This man had always been polite to Isa in a city where few were, so Isa gave the saber another push into his body, ending his suffering.

“Wait…” Bensidar was reeling, grasping for the sabers that had been on his own belt only moments earlier. “How…” He looked to the empty hook where Isa’s cassock had been hanging when they came in, “the fuck—”

Isa came at him before he could finish, quick but slightly off balance. The slash was clumsy, opening a gash from Bensidar’s right breast to his left collar bone.

“Shit,” Isa muttered. He had been aiming for the throat and the slip had cost him valuable time, allowing the remaining gunman to ram his ball and patch home and pull his hammer back for a third shot. Isa didn’t have time to cross the room.

Instead, he grabbed the bleeding swordsman, spun him into the line of fire, and yanked him close with a saber across his neck.

“Don’t!” Bensidar cried out, all his bravado washed out in a wave of panic. “Please, Jednas! Don’t shoot!”

The younger gunman—Jednas, apparently—ignored Bensidar, looking past him at Isa with vicious glee. “You idiot!”

“I’m the idiot?” Isa said, stalling for time.

“This is a Cassidar 700, you know. At this range, the shot’ll go through you both.”

“Putting Telasus down two men instead of one,” Isa said as Bensidar made an inarticulate sound of betrayal. “He’s already so shorthanded. Am I really worth it?”

Jednas narrowed his eyes, plainly trying to run the numbers in his head. His finger didn’t leave the trigger.

“Come on,” Isa pressed as Bensidar breathed shallowly against him, unsteady with blood loss. “Put the gun down and I’ll let you both walk away.”

Isa didn’t expect the stubborn young fanatic to listen to reason. Didn’t him need to. Isa just needed him to hesitate long enough for the locked door at his shoulder to fly open.

“You think I’m going to take the word of a dirty, Goddess-denying—”

And there went the door, kicked in so hard Isa was surprised it didn’t fly across the room—surprised but not disappointed. The fact that the hinges held meant that the slab of hard cypress slammed right into Jednas, knocking the pistol from his hands. A third terrible bang rang Isa’s head as the shot went wide, blowing a hole in the grimy baseboards.

“Damo,” Isa didn’t bother hiding his relief. “Took you long enough.”

The Sazuman stood in the doorway stark naked, every inch of skin aglow with post-coital energy.

“Oh, Ostia!” Kadnus Kerisadne exclaimed from over her shoulder, bedsheets clutched about his waist. “What did you—? What’s going on here?”

Jednas staggered from behind the door dazed, and screwed up his face in confusion, seemingly unsure if the naked goddess before him was real or the result of severe head trauma. “You’re…”

“She’s a tactomancer!” Bensidar warned, more lucid than his comrade but still helpless with Isa’s saber to his neck. “Kill her! Kill her now!”

Jednas hesitated for a moment, seemed to decide he wasn’t above hitting a woman, and popped Damo in the face. She stood there and let it happen; she always liked to give a new opponent the first swing, but if he’d wanted it to count, he should have taken the extra second to retrieve his pistol and hit her with the clubbed handle. His bare fist made her head snap back but her grin only widened.

“Respectable,” she said, then rolled her neck and returned fire.

Kadnus must have been a decent lay because the blow didn’t just cave the gunman’s face—that Damored could do with a good old-fashioned non-magic punch—but sent him flying across the room in a burst of blood and brain matter. He hit the opposite wall with a wet crunch, and slid to the floor, all but headless, leaving a red smear down the plaster.

Gore used to hold a feverish appeal for Isa. Right at the moment, it had a similar effect to the over-bright light, turning his gut. He looked away from the twitching body as Kadnus screamed and loosed a string of colorful Krellish expletives.

“You’re welcome,” Damo smiled, shaking out her head-breaking hand. “Need help with that one?” She nodded at Isa’s captive, who had gone still in shock or resignation, maybe both.

“No,” Isa grimaced. “I’m fine.” To Bensidar, he said, “Hope Ostia Torrens is impressed with those two houses,” and drew his saber across the man’s throat.

“Thank the Goddess!” Damo clapped her hands together as Bensidar’s body slipped from Isa’s arms to the floor. “Isa Inkarnam is back!” In her elation she turned to Kadnus and planted a kiss on his lips, cutting short his stream of curse words.

Certainly, the contents of Isa’s stomach were back, burning acid at the back of his throat, and he had to focus hard on the floor before him to keep from heaving. It was just the hangover, he told himself. The sight of blood never used to make him sick. Not before Spensa, anyway.

Muffled shouts of alarm had broken out all through the inn. Isa didn’t need the python’s vibration sensors to pick up on a dozen-some pairs of feet hitting the floor and scrambling to find the source of the gunshots.

“That’s our cue to leave, boys.” Damo jerked her head down the hall. “Next door. Quick.”

She steered a shaken Kadnus out of the room by his shoulders, leaving Isa to wrench his saber from the older gunman’s body and hastily clean both his blades before following the couple into their room.

“This can’t happen! I-I can’t be seen here!” Kadnus was gasping as Damo’s lemur, Tapia, bounced around in agitation. “Those were Tradelord Telasus’ men! M-my father—”

“Isn’t gonna find out,” Damo said, pulling on her undergarments. “You won’t be connected to any of this.”

“What? How?”

“By doing exactly as I say.” The commotion had reached the hall outside, followed by a scream as someone discovered the gruesome mess they had made in Isa’s room. “Kadnus, bolt the door and get your damn clothes on. Isa, window.”

As the couple scrambled to dress, Isa unlatched the shutters over the east-facing window, pushed them open, and climbed onto the sill. The faceful of daylight might as well have been a bucket of kerosene to his smoldering headache. As the pain flared to a blinding inferno, he had to grip the window frame to keep from toppling to his death. For a moment, he thought he might heave out the window, but the impulse passed and he cracked his eyes open just wide enough to gauge the distance across the alley to the roof of the neighboring house. Over seven feet. And the roof sloped, meaning that the smallest miscalculation of the landing could spell death.

Isa could make the jump with care, Damo with ease, but they had a normal with them and that normal was their ticket out of Krell, so Isa reassessed. The drop to the flagstones below was well over fifteen feet. No problem for Damo but potentially ankle-breaking for their companion. A lattice of vines covered the outside of the inn, but like most leaves in the dry season, these looked crunchy with thirst, and Isa wouldn’t count on the foliage to support a climber.

“Doable?” Damo asked, joining him at the window.

He shook his head. “Are you good to hold three to five hundred pounds?”

“Sure.”

“Give me your arm. I need you to anchor me.”

“Huh?”

“Your boy won’t make the jump. I’m going to help him to the ground—unless you want to jump down first and catch him?” Isa wasn’t feeling particularly averse to shoving a tradelord’s son out of a window at the moment.

“Your way sounds quieter.” She still wasn’t fully clothed, her vest unlaced, shirt untucked and loose over her leggings, but this didn’t seem to bother her. Cramming her skirt into her bag, she offered her arm. “Have at it.”

Isa stepped back inside the room and transformed, only halfway into the process realizing they had forgotten to warn Kadnus what he was about to see. The tradeling’s yelp was mercifully shrill, fading out as soon as Isa lost the ability to register high-frequency sounds.

“Don’t worry, sugar,” Damo said, her calmer voice only partially distorted through the python’s lower-register hearing. “Isa’s gonna help us out of here. Grab on.”

“I beg your pardon!”

Isa didn’t wait for Kadnus to get his nerve up. Moved by serpentine impulse, he wrapped around the Krellishman’s torso and pulled tight, pinning his arms to his sides. Kadnus started to shout and Isa’s first instinct was to constrict on those troublesome lungs before anyone noticed the commotion.

But Damo had a marginally gentler approach.

“Shh.” She put a glowing hand over Kadnus’ mouth, simultaneously muffling the sound and a fraction of his knee-jerk terror. “Isa’s gonna get you out of here. The scene next door should distract everyone for a hot second, but only if we keep things quiet before they think to start searching the whole building.”

Kadnus subsided and Isa extended down the side of the building, lowering the Krellishman as he went. The act of moving bodies around wasn’t instinctual for pythons, who ate their prey where it fell. Rather than relying on the python’s innate patterns of movement, Isa had to carefully monitor all twenty-eight feet of coils, making sure his tail stayed wound firmly around Damo’s arm—secure but not damaging—while his neck stayed tight around Kadnus—also secure but without sinking his teeth into any of the conveniently available holds.

His cargo might have whimpered a bit as Isa drew him down the vine-covered wall but didn’t make enough noise to draw attention. When the bulk of Isa’s coils had breached the window, Damored’s arm crooked to ninety degrees and held there like the limb of a baobab, her other hand braced flat against the wall to anchor her. Toward the end, when Isa’s full three hundred and fifty pounds—plus Kadnus’ hundred and seventy-some—were dangling out the window, her arm started to shake ever so slightly. But Isa quickly set Kadnus on his feet and let him go.

As the Krellishman scrambled back and flattened himself against the opposite alley wall, Isa released Damo’s arm and slid his jaw attentively over the ground to check that the coast was clear. They were alone in the alley. No human footsteps reached his vibration sensors as he brought the rest of his coils slowly down behind him. Just the mincing click of pigeons poking around the flagstones nearby.

Damo’s boots hit the ground as Isa slid back into human form and the accompanying hangover, which was bleeding from sharp pain at the temples to a knot of nausea deep in the stomach.

“Y-you… Did you just jump?” Kadnus gaped as Damo’s lemur skittered down the vines behind her and leapt to her shoulders.

“Yeah.” Damo preened, fluffing her curls around her shoulders with a smile. “Thanks to Isa, I didn’t have to do it with you in my arms. Now, let’s get—Isa, are you alright?”

“Is he alright?” Kadnus said too loudly—or maybe his voice was just too loud for Isa, to who was finding everything too loud this morning. “He was just an anaconda!”

“Python,” Isa ground out. “And it’s just a h—” He jerked with the urge to heave. “Headache.”

"Oh, Isa!" Damo laughed in surprise. “Baby boy, are you hungover?”

“Shut up,” Isa grunted. “It’s—your f—” Another turn of the stomach, swallowed back from the precipice—“fault.” Although, Damo couldn’t reasonably take all the blame. Yanking one’s consciousness from a man to a snake and back first thing in the morning was hell on the stomach. And chomping on human flesh instead of a quiet breakfast likely hadn’t helped.

“Here.” Damo produced a flask from her bag and offered it to Isa. “One sip.”

“Is this…?”

“Pure Goddess Gift, straight from the highest ring of Sazuma.” She pressed the flask between Isa’s lips and he swallowed.

Goddess Gift tasted no different from any clean water but its power was evident the moment it slipped down Isa’s throat. Immediately, the light gentled, the blades retracted from his temples, and his nausea settled to cool clarity like floodplains after a mud-churning downpour.

“Better?” Damo asked.

“Yes.” He blinked in surprise. “I didn’t realize that stuff cured hangovers.”

“Every affliction on Goddess’ Good Earth,” Damo said. “Ready to run now?”

He was surprised again to find that the answer was, “Yes.” And he easily followed Damo’s bouncing gold curls as she broke into a run. It was like the water had somehow made him stronger as well as clearing his head.

“Where are we going?” Kadnus asked, doing a respectable job keeping pace with the two mercenaries.

“Menindar’s Bridge,” Damo said. “That’s the quickest way back across the Sazumriver to your house, yeah?”

“I’m sorry,” Kadnus said indignantly. “Across the what?”

“I’m with the tradeling,” Isa gave Damo a smile. “This far south, I don’t think you get to call it the Sazumriver.”

“It starts in Sazuma,” Damo said in a rare moment of nationalism. “No matter how far it flows or how crappy the water gets, it’s the same river.”

Few in history had beheld the river’s source but legend claimed it was the last gift Goddess—or God, depending on the faith of the storyteller—had left on Earth before deserting humanity. The sacred spring water bubbled from deep inside the thousand-foot-high tree whose roots formed the city-state of Sazuma. From there, it descended the root tiers in great falls before pouring southeast through the Riverlands on its way to the sea. The water freshest from the spring—Goddess Gift—was infused with pre-Ascension magic. It was what gave Sazumans their godlike stature and gold freckles, their tactomancy, and their immunity to common ailments.

Distance and rainfall diluted the water’s magic on its way through the Wilds, making its effects spotty beyond the roots of Sazuma. By the time it reached the Riverland states of Krell and Azenkar, it was functionally regular water, restorative but not magical.

The Krellish called the river Tisadne, the Lady’s Vein. To Isa, it was only ever the River, so ancient it predated the oldest states in the region, so long no human could ride from one end to the other, so wide no bridge could span it—well, that last part was only true in Azenkar. Here, where the water was deep and narrow, the Krellish had erected three river-spanning bridges: Drusadne's bridge in the north, Ostia's Rib at the heart of the city, and Menindar's bridge at the southern harbor. The bridges dwarfed everything in Krell except the Bone Lords' towers that kept their sinister vigil in the distance. Menindar’s Bridge crested the rooftops ahead of the trio like a wave, its stone arc stretching the full mile from the north bank to the south, supported by a row of smaller arches.

“Come on, honey,” Damo urged Kadnus, whose footfalls had grown heavy and labored behind her and Isa. “Almost there.”

As they ran, Damo had somehow managed to finish lacing her vest and arranging her sex-tousled braids around the top of her head. She was fully decent by the time they slowed to a walk through the marketplace at the north foot of Menindar’s Bridge.

“Do you never wear a bonnet?” Kadnus frowned, ducking his head low beneath his hat as Damo’s golden hair and naked face drew stares. Isa might have applauded his caution but a bonnet seemed like a minor concern relative to the fact that Damo had just punched a man’s head off. Then again, Kadnus was a tradelord’s son. Maybe violence just wasn’t as scandalous to him as an immodest woman.

“You know, when you’re a head taller than most of the men around, a bonnet doesn’t do much to make you less conspicuous,” Damo said. Though Isa guessed that that was only half the truth; the other half was that Damo enjoyed being noticed. Always had, even cited it as a reason she had abandoned the Spy Guild of Sazuma. Attention provided more opportunities for shenanigans, and shenanigans were Damo’s favorite.

“I wasn’t talking about drawing attention. I was talking about modesty. Shame.”

“Shame’s a heavy thing, Kadnus,” Damo said as they mounted the bridge. “When you live as fast as I do, you try not to carry too much of it. Slows you down. Speaking of which…” She glanced over her shoulder at her companions. “You two look like you could use a breather.”

Isa could have kept pace with Damo a while longer if necessary but Kadnus was lagging, looking drained.

“Over here.” She motioned them to the stone rail of the bridge. “Let’s rest a minute.”

The place she had chosen was mostly obscured by a fruit stand that legally should not have been set up on this part of the bridge, so close to the designated carriage lane. Smart. If authorities happened by, they’d be too busy arresting the fruit vendor to notice a pair of foreigners and a tradelord’s son slipping away in the background.

As Kadnus resumed whinging, Isa placed his palms to the stone and stared over the water to think. Downriver of the bridge, boats moved in and out of a natural harbor beneath a flurry of gulls—little sloops and skiffs, burnished galleys, and even a few new-fangled steamboats, their wheels churning the water behind them as their smokestacks trailed puffs of pale gray.

It was a beautiful picture from this distance. But it darkened with the thought that well over half of the goods moving through that harbor belonged to a small handful of powerful tradelords. Somewhere down there, on one of those boats, the male slaves from Telasus’ warehouse were chained together in a cargo hold, waiting to be shipped to certain death in the arenas of Trestantia.

Isa felt nearer to those men now than he had standing a few feet from their cage the previous night. He could smell their sweat, their fear, and in the clarity of day, he knew that he was one mistake away from joining them. Formidable he might be, but so were most who went to the pits, and the Krellish had ways of subduing animancers.

“Damo,” he said in Hunter’s Pidgin so that Kadnus wouldn’t follow, “Whatever we’re doing next, could we make it fast? That mess at the inn won’t take long to get back to Telasus.”

“How long do you think we have?”

“We should be out of Krell—at least out of the Menindar neighborhood—by nightfall, if we don’t want trouble.” If Telasus had found Isa within twelve hours once, he could do it again. And next time, Isa was betting there would be more than two guns.

He was already eyeing the water, thinking it might be best to jump in, just in case anyone onshore was already looking for the Inkarnam with the long braid and twin sabers. Pythons were strong swimmers but Isa hesitated on the memory that meaner reptiles ruled these waters. He had survived encounters with Tisadne crocodiles in the past, but he wasn’t keen to try his luck again.

“So, what you’re tellin' me,” Damo sighed, “is that I’ve gotta skip ahead to shakin' the shells outta our pretty little money bag over here.”

“Well, we'll need that boat before Telasus goes crying to the police.”

“What are you two talking about?” Kadnus demanded.

Damo threw him a glance but stuck to Hunter’s Pidgin, still addressing Isa. “You’ll wanna make yourself scarce. Hide somewhere until I come for you.”

“Somewhere?” Isa repeated as an annoyed Kadnus said, “Hello? Is anyone listening to me?”

“Preferably along this bank,” Damo said, still ignoring him.

“How will you find me?”

“Tapia’ll take care of it.” She scratched the rust-red fur between the lemur’s ears. “Leave a snake trail, and she’ll sniff you out.”

“Alright,” Isa agreed, eager to be on his way before things got truly awkward between Damo and her mark. “I’ll leave you to your blackmail then.”

Hunter’s Pidgin had many words in common with Krellish, and Kadnus’ expression darkened. “Wait a minute. Did he say blackmail?”

“Alright, I’m out,” Isa said and, crocs be damned, tipped backward off the bridge to the water below.

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this chapter of Seven Forsaken. You can get new chapters of this story early and read more serialized stories from the world of Altima on my Patreon.

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